Barely awake, I studied my dream and found at first in my mind the question which I poses on the subject of that name: Toutmuss. While the other episodes returned to my memory, a flash lit up my brain--the Tout of Toutmuss must be spelled Tooth; for Muss, my perplexity persisted; the link with pamplemousse didn't feel at all right. But then a second flash! This Muss must be spelled Smooth. The whole name is thus Toothsmooth, that the tigress claims as a reward for her sweetness and gentleness with me, as she could claim she maintained 'velvet paws'.

This curious dream brought up interesting points:

1. Seeking the origin of its diverse particularities, I find:
   1. I have two sheepdogs who have neatly give my tigress the color of her pelt. Yesterday, they were cruelly beaten, and my wife remarked to me that the youngest had teeth as terribly long and sharp as a croc's.
   2. The difficulty of getting meat scraps for our animals; dogs, cats and chickens add daily to our costs.
   3. Yesterday, before sleep, to renew an experiment that I sometimes do, I tried to review all the wanderings of my last voyage to America to see if they oriented my dream, and I had on this occasion recall grapefruit--pamplemousse. And I returned in memory to a conversation I had with an English lady on the boat:
      Me: "how do you like the voyage?"
      She: "Very pleasant, indeed, and the sea is so smooth!"
      This word smooth struck me, because it's not a literal translation of any of the terms by which we express in French that the sea is calm; and so I've always remembered it. I didn't dream of America, but two bits of it invaded my dream: the pamplemousse and the smooth.
2. Note the streetcorner with the light and the hurried passer-by. It's a strong image of the outer world, yet has no hint of hallucinatory character; I knew, while it filled my mind, that it was nothing but a thought or vision that I conceived as outside me, while I was inside my cellar.
3. But the most curious trait is the name of Mistress Toothsmooth... Voilà a name singularly appropriate to the circumstance, yet in my dreaming brain I spelled it so it was entirely senseless! If one accepts that coincidence is unlikely, one must face that I carried out an intelligent cognitive operation without knowing it. It's cases like this that one must call Unconscious...

Delage's dreams came to my attention in Carl Jung's Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, which has a chapter on Delage's Le Rêve, a 600-page work with 173 dreams in it (not all Delage's), never translated into English. This sample dream's my crude translation/transcription from a (blurry) copy online at the Internet Archive. A pain, but I wanted at least one example of Delage.

You can see why Jung liked Delage's dreams; Toothsmooth is a vivid anima figure dreamt just two years after Jung's own dream Dove Girl, the origin of the anima concept. When Toothsmooth named herself, Jung was still groping. So is Delage, of course; he only traces the roots of her odd name, but surely there's much in Toothsmooth he ignores. Delage spends hours in the cellar petting a catgirl (and his wife doesn't seem to care). Interspecies telepathy (well, spiritualism was in the air, but plenty of people still denied human evolution). Toothsmooth is ill-fed and he claims they can't afford even scraps for her (while huge hunks of meat hang, and she politely starves!) He urges her to go out and devour the neighbors' cats (is he proposing to sneak out, and... tomcat around?). Most interesting of all, Mistress Toothsmooth names herself, wants to be recognized as a person deserving respect as well as food--which neither Delage nor the Jungians in that seminar seem to see. "That's Mistress Anima to you."

Being an ignorant primitive myself, I see non-Freudian non-Jungian possibilities:

1. Delage and even Jung (that shaman in denial) assume that figures like Toothsmooth are always parts of the self. But that's an unproven Western assumption that primitives like me feel wary about. That assumption causes a paradox--"how can I have made up this bilingual pun and then mis-hear my own creation in the dream?" But what if Toothsmooth isn't a facet of Delage? Mind you I don't think this is likely, because her name hinges on knowing both French and English, and that the English sound "th" registers to the French ear confusingly, as either "s" or "t". These are things Delage knows. Would tiger spirits (or domestic cats or most dreamers in a small French town, for that matter) know or care? Do succubi speak French?

   Well, probably.

   On the other hand, Delage experiences subjective telepathy (what do I mean, subjective? That they're telepathic in his dream, but when he wakes there's no proof that it really was telepathy--which can happen! I told you I'm a primitive.) This might be a self-flagging dream, a dream announcing it's a certain type. Say, dream characters discuss lucidity so that you go lucid; dream symbols are explained in the dream; a mechanic tells you "this dream's literal, your bad brakes don't symbolize an inability to say no--check your brakes!"; telepathy is discussed, and the next day your dream turns out to parallel a friend's. Self-flagging.

   So for me, Delage's experience of telepathy could be his brain trying to say "this is external input". From what? A spirit intrigued by a dream-researcher in ultra-rational France? (slim pickings!--bread not meat.) Or a pet cat who likes his petting and has her own unrealizable dreams? (as Lady Murr remarks in The Game of Rat and Dragon, "What a pity he is not a cat!") Or a human dreamer--a neighbor, maid or nanny?--who'd like Delage to pet her and evades the wrath of his wife by turning feline (and not straining the budget)?

   All unlikely, but you can't assess possibilities if you can't imagine them. And European intellectuals must act on psychoanalytic not shamanic premises, or get shunned as superstitious. Jung's pretty conservative and still got tarred.

2. To me this dream seems a friendly attempt by Delage's anima (whether a part of him or not) to help him in his research. Delage discusses a famous dream, Alfred Maury's Guillotine. In it he got beheaded--just as the headboard of his bed came loose and fell on his neck, waking him. But Maury's dream theory was strictly stimulus/response; he never asks if Guillotine could be predictive; he can only conclude dreams must be instantaneous--the whole epic created as he was hit, to explain the blow. Researchers (including Freud) accepted Maury's hasty conclusion for generations before the discovery of REM showed dreams normally run in realtime. Making Guillotine a puzzle again!

   Now when I started serious dreamwork, I too had an apparently predictive dream like Maury's: Fanfare Foreseen. Glad I'm a savage! I could hypothesize not only that my dream foresaw the racket that woke me, I could also notice it came when I'd just read Maury's dream and wondered if it could be predictive not instantaneous. My dream helped me by letting me experience what Maury did! So I suspect that Maury's dreams too may have been trying to show off their full range of ability--not just stimulus-response but sometimes predictive. True, their experiment (in stimulating Maury, hoping to get an intelligent response) misfired--sing to a tone-deaf man, and he just wonders why you speak so oddly--but E for Effort.

   Mistress Toothsmooth, then, may be trying to make contact partly to protest her unfair neglect. The dream certainly points out some hypocrisy there! But Toothsmooth may also have made such an overture because Delage was doing dream research, to help him in that process by showing that the supposedly instinctual Unconscious was in fact quite conscious, both of self and of other--and wanted his so-called conscious to acknowledge her. By name. In print.

   And it worked.

SOURCE: Le Reve by Yves Delage, 1916, p.335-8. Comments from Carl Jung's Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern, 2014 reprint, p. 64-5.

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